Quit the whining - this makes perfect sense to me. Why should Bernanke buy treasuries when rates are at all time lows? It makes far more sense to monetize other assets, particularly stocks and mortgage backed securities, in order to stimulate the economy.

I am beginning to wonder if this is simply posturing on their part to get the retail suckers to BUY ponzi stock, but in the end the CB's do nothing... (they KNOW once they begin such a suicidal move to buy "private" assets, hyperinflation follows close behind, thus my take this is pure bluff)

Posn and Bernanke not only need to justify why central banks buying commercial assets is "good" for an economy but also detail the Exit Plan and dates and what they think will happen to the value of said assets when they sell

if the BoE and Fed are to become mortgage and stock holders the onlòy reason is the retail banks cannot sell them on, there is no market for them

Posn and Bernanke are bankers bitches, Govt pooper scoopers, what a sham/shambles

Regardless of whether or not you are a troll, I have a question. If purchasing other assets and liquidity injections is beneficial to economies, then why can't every person in the world role up to the discount window, get some 0% loans, deposit those funds into the bond market for a short-temr basis, pick up the interest and stimulate themselves? I like stimulating myself.

By late 1923, the Weimar Republic of Germany was issuing two-trillion Mark banknotes and postage stamps with a face value of fifty billion Mark. The highest value banknote issued by the Weimar government's Reichsbank had a face value of 100 trillion Mark (100,000,000,000,000; 100 million million).[10][11] At the height of the inflation, one US dollar was worth 4 trillion German marks. One of the firms printing these notes submitted an invoice for the work to the Reichsbank for 32,776,899,763,734,490,417.05 (3.28 × 1019, or 33 quintillion) Marks.[12]

If it makes a perfect sense to you, you better check you senses. What is wrong with with a systems where ONE authority, decides what is "valuable" well EVERYTHING. This was not even possible under in the socialist east countries. They just created the price control and all of the goods disappeared.

If Bernanke, goes after the the valuable things, why not go after the food products. Buy a lot of them, and store everything. This will be the best use for the buck. I bet that after such, actually quite wise investment decision, there will be wide spread civil war.

Bernanke will go after, particular assets, "value" of which will tend to preserve the current, unsustainable, status of the corrupt and inefficient economic system. By the way, economic comes from economize ( do with least resources ), and it is totaly different from what this system has become. It is not ECONOMical it is WASTical.

I guess you did not get the memo. The NDAA allows the government to nationalize the farms, transport and supermarkets to ensure national security. They can control the price of food, and make sure everyone has an EBT.

The masses will be complacent (complicit?) and there will be no civil war, at least not in North America.

As for those poor countries that refuse to depeg their currencies, and lack the foresight to have food stamp programs, they will be screwed.

"His most cited and influential publications include the books Restoring Japan's Economic Growth (1998) and Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience (1999, co-authored with Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the US, et al)''

But ... but ... Lord Keynes assured us these "honorable gentlemen" were above such temptations. Oh my, don't tell me the whole wobbling edifice of modern economics is based on such a patently false premise as the moral incorruptibility of society's elite intellectuals and (small "d") democrats. Looks like we may have backed the wrong Lord.

I believe Hayek said: "What's correct in the General Theory is not original ... and what's original is not correct." or words to that effect.

And as for the Labor Theory of Value ... I agree it's a massive and dangerous fallacy. Labor is just one cost input in the calculation of the total cost of manufacturing any good and that total cost only tells you what your absolute break-even selling price must be. But the utility and benefits of the good determine the price on the market that people are willing to pay. In other words: Subjective Valuation.

I am rehypothecating your thingamajig. I will give you a fiat loan and use your thingamajig as collateral and so will my 12 banker friends (we are a coven of 13 you know) in my circle jerk ponzi as we hand it off to one another. Squeeeze the accounting value out of that thingamajig. We will become a mighty corporation. And while you actually hold it, its notional value will go up (because everyone will demand thingamajigs as collateral), and so will our borrowing power.

Rehypothecate REAL ASSETS NOW! Vaporize them later and do a disappearing act. Magic Bitchez.

And nickels and pennies. The metal value of all physical coins and the ratios between copper, silver, and gold will be known by anyone trading goods for coinage. www.coinflation.com is a good place to calculate values.

Oh the horror when clicking on that site! Just think of all the littering...just makes me want to cry. We need some libs to start a program like "adopt a highway" and call it adopt a psyops theatre, distribute orange bags and voila.

not a terribly difficult study to conduct... and i've seen it done. I wish I could pull up the link, but some prepper somewhere published pricing on a fairly large cross-sections of life sustaining products. It's been a fairly dramatic move. Your doritos example is par for the course.

Same thing here and pack shrinkage has gotten very noticable since the beginning of 2012.

In fact me and the wife did a comparative 'shop' in ASDA (Walmart) a few weeks ago. We'd found an old till receipt in a purse she doesn't use much from 2010, so we went round the shop with a calculator and added up what the same list would cost now. 42 items, mostly food and toiletries:

We also noted that at least 7 of the food items definitely used to come in larger packets. She works in a retail store as manager and some of what they sell is surplus supermarket stock approaching it's 'Best Before' date, so it's been warehoused for a while in most cases. Case in point; Tetley Tea Bags - box made about 2.5 yrs ago had 120 in it and cost £1.08. Same size box now has 100 in it and costs £1.59. She has both in stock at her place, currently. The customers get the dear ones and our prep supplies get the cheap ones!

Yup, the standard tactic seems to be that they reduce the contents of the packet, even if the pack size doesn't change, but keep the price the same. Then 4-6 weeks later, they put the price up by about the same percentage as they reduced the contents. Wait a while and repeat.

The really cynical ploy we've noticed is to do the above, then once sales start to fall off due to the higher price - bring out a 'limited time only' pack with 10% extra free. Which doesn't make up the loss in the amount of contents, usually, and still costs the new higher price!

There was some historian on BBC radio this morning who said much the same thing. He was, of course, rapidly cut off by the presenter. They didn't, however, stop him almost ranting for 2-3 minutes about the differences in economic morality between those who had kids during and immediately after WW-II and generally took the view that their kids should grow up in a better world than they'd had... and the economic morality of those kids themselves 20 years later!

Was quite an interesting radio segment, actually. Particularly the conjecture that the best thing Britain (and America, in the unlikely event that Germany wouldn't have won the war inside 15-18 months) could have done for Europe, from a 'peace in our time' point of view, was NOT to have gotten involved in WW-I, as beating the Germans did nothing to settle age-old animosities between the nations involved, but simply set the stage for WW-II.